There is an increasing concern over counterfeit products including software, music CDs, and over-the-counter and prescription drugs entering the U.S. market. Counterfeit products not only depress profits of legitimate manufactures, but consumers who unknowingly purchase counterfeit products are being misled. Because of health issues involving counterfeit drugs, this is a paramount concern of drug manufacturers and governmental agencies. The concern is exacerbated because of the ready availability of lower cost prescription drugs from Internet pharmacies and drug stores with undisclosed sources for the product they provide.
Because of governmental regulations and/or to prevent unauthorized tampering, many prescription and over-the-counter drugs are packaged in containers using tamper-resistant seals. The consumer purchasing a drug product must break or destroy the tamper-resistant seal in order to open the container and access the product. While such tamper-resistant seals effectively thwart tampering, sophisticated counterfeit drug manufacturers may manufacture containers that include a tamper-resistant seal. Thus, tamper-resistant seals do not adequately address the issue of counterfeit drugs.
Many other anti-counterfeit measures have been developed for use with other products that been prime targets for counterfeiters such as checks, CDs and DVDs. These anti-counterfeit measures attempt to prevent a counterfeit manufacturer from easily reproducing labels that bear anti-counterfeit indicia. For example, companies such as Microsoft Corporation use holograms on the packages of their software to indicate authenticity. Escher Group of Cambridge, Mass. has developed a FiberFingerprint.™. technology that can identify a piece of paper by its natural and unique fiber patterns. This enables the capability to identify a piece of paper in a way similar to identifying people through fingerprints. Tracer Technologies of Syosset, N.Y. has developed a fluorescent micro-fiber detection technology for security. The micro-fibers are randomly embedded in a plastic material which are only revealed upon illumination by UV light. AMCO of Farmingdale, N.Y. has developed visible as well as fluorescent tags that can be embedded in plastics. Other pigments that can be imbedded in an anti-counterfeit label or in a product have the capability of changing color when viewed at different angles. Such a color-changing pigment is also present in certain denominations of newly printed U.S. currency.
These anti-counterfeiting technologies make it difficult to reproduce the anti-counterfeit label component using copying or scanning techniques. However, more sophisticated counterfeiters have been known to make the investment necessary to duplicate these anti-counterfeit measures. For example, the holographic labels such as those used by Microsoft Corporation are known to have been successfully counterfeited.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,309,011 to He entitled ‘Method of Authenticating Products Using Hardware Compatibility Flag’ is assigned to the assignee of the present application and is incorporated herein by reference. This patent concerns a method of identifying or authenticating a product by providing an analog identification indicia including a randomized pattern of identification features on a first part of the product wherein one or more attributes of the randomized pattern of identification features correspond to an item identifier. A digital identification record is provided on a second part of the product including an encoded digital version of the item identifier. The randomized pattern of identification features of the analog identification indicia is read and decoded to generate an item identifier and the digital identification record is read and decoded to generate an item identifier. The product is deemed authentic if the item identifier from the analog identification indicia substantially matches the item identifier from the digital identification record.
United States published application 2006/0095778 to He et al, entitled ‘Analog and Digital Indicia Authentication’ is assigned to the assignee of the present application and is incorporated herein by reference. This published application also concerns an authentication-enabled indicia contains authentication information in a digital recording medium. Characteristics of the reflected light when the features are illuminated is used to generate an analog signature that is encoded in the recording medium. During processing the features are illuminated and a new analog signature is determined for comparison with the signature recorded in the digital recording medium.